another braid of voices and melodies. They reached the second verse, and
the other four joined in, the room with them.
Gwyn’s voice soared like a bird through the cavern as she started the
third song with a solo, and Nesta closed her eyes, leaning into the music,
shutting out one sense in order to luxuriate in the sound of her friend.
Something beckoned in Gwyn’s song, in a way the others’ hadn’t. Like
Gwyn was calling only to her, her voice full of sunshine and joy and
unshakable determination. Nesta had never heard a voice like Gwyn’s—by
turns trained and wild, as if there was so much sound fighting to break free
of Gwyn that she couldn’t quite contain it all. As if the sound needed to be
loose in the world.
The others joined Gwyn for the second verse, and the harp’s harmonies
rose above their song, archways of wordless notes.
With her eyes closed, only the music mattered—the song, the voices,
the harp. It wrapped around her, as if she’d been dropped into a bottomless
pool of sound. Gwyn’s voice rose again, holding such a high note it was
like a ray of pure light, piercing and summoning. Two other voices rolled in
to join, pulsing around that repeated high note, the harp still strumming,
voices whispering and flowing, lulling Nesta down, down, down into a
pure, ancient place where no outside world existed, no time, nothing but the
music in her bones, the stones at her feet, her side, overhead.
The music took form behind Nesta’s eyes as the priestesses sang lyrics
in languages so old, no one voiced them anymore. She saw what the song
spoke of: mossy earth and golden sun, clear rivers and the deep shadows of
an ancient forest. The harp strummed, and mountains rolled ahead, as if a
veil had been cleared with the stroke of those strings, and she was flying
toward it—toward a massive, mist-veiled mountain, the land barren save for
moss and stones and a gray, stormy sea around it. The mountain itself held
two peaks at its very top, and the stones jutting from its sides were carved
in strange, ancient symbols, as old as the song itself.
Nesta’s body melted away, her bones and the stones of the cavern a
distant memory as she flowed into the mountain, beheld towering, carved
gates, and passed through them into a darkness so complete it was
primordial; darkness that was full of living things, terrible things.
A path led into the dark, and she followed it, past doors with no
handles, sealed forever. She felt horrors lurk behind those doors, one horror